Synapse

by Steven James

  One of the forms outside passed across the street. Someone fired at the front of the pharmacy, and the remaining window exploded into a wicked cloud of glass shards that rained down on the floor all around us.

  “You hit?” he asked me. He was still in front of me and there was urgent concern in his voice.

  “I’m good. You?”

  “Just a scratch. I’ll be okay.”

  “You’re shot?” I gasped.

  “Left arm, but it’s superficial. Don’t worry. I’ve had worse.”

  He raised the rifle, aimed carefully, and shot across the street into the darkness. Someone fired back, but he squeezed the trigger again twice and there was no volley of shots in response. I didn’t know if that meant he’d killed someone or if they’d run off after being shot at.

  “Can you hear any more of them outside?”

  He was quiet, then nodded. “There’re two more. The rest have fled.”

  “Are you bleeding?”

  “I’m alright.”

  I heard police sirens in the distance. Because of the part of the city we were in, I was a bit surprised that the authorities were responding so quickly, unless someone had called in to warn them beforehand about what was going down.

  “Time to leave,” Nick said. “I don’t want you to have to be interrogated by the cops.”

  Then it hit me—he could justify why he was here, but what believable reason could I give them as to why I was meeting with Purists in this neighborhood?

  Quietly, and what appeared to be effortlessly, he stalked forward to the corner of the wall near the window. I stood behind him as he leaned out between the bars, passed the gun in an arc across the street, took two more careful shots, and then snapped back toward me, away from the window. He let out a slow breath. “Alright, one left. Wait here. Count down from ten.”

  “What?”

  “Count down from ten. I’ll be back by the time you get to one.”

  I didn’t want him to leave me, but I figured he knew better than I did what the best course of action was.

  With swift and sure purpose he passed through the door onto the sidewalk while I flattened my back against the wall, and, trying to calm myself, started my countdown.

  Ten.

  The whole night seemed a bit surreal—

  Nine.

  Speaking to Conrad through the glass—

  Eight.

  Being shot at—

  Seven.

  Nick getting hit—

  Six.

  Hearing sirens blare closer in the night—

  Five.

  I wished he would hurry back. I wished—

  Four.

  No more shots were fired—

  Three.

  No sounds except those sirens—

  Two.

  And—

  “All clear.” It was Nick, just outside the window, soundlessly emerging from the shadows. “You alright?”

  “Yes. What now?”

  “Now we leave before the cops get here. I’ll need to come back and look around, see what I can learn from the guy who’s unconscious in the corner, but I don’t want you here. I don’t want you being questioned.”

  “My car is two blocks away,” I told him.

  “Mine’s closer. You can wait in there until I’m done. Come on.”

  * * *

  After Nick had ascertained that Kestrel was safe in his car and he’d given her a blanket from the trunk to stay warm in the chilled night, he returned to the scene of the shooting.

  By now, the place was crawling with Cincinnati police officers. An ambulance stood waiting beside the front of the drugstore.

  Nick identified himself to the police lieutenant who was in charge, and after his ID had been confirmed, he explained his role in the shootout, and how he’d quieted two threats while an unknown number of attackers had gotten away.

  As the paramedics bandaged his bleeding left arm, he asked who’d contacted dispatch.

  “Anonymous caller.” The lieutenant gestured toward his patrol car. “What do you want us to do with that guy?”

  The Purist Nick had knocked out earlier was awake and sitting in the backseat of the car.

  “Take him to the federal building. I’ll talk with him there.”

  “Alright.” The lieutenant shrugged. “It’s your rodeo.” He sounded relieved to have less work to do himself.

  Nick called for his forensic techs to come to the pharmacy. Since he’d been fired at first, there wouldn’t be any difficulty in clearing the shooting, but still, he’d had to put two people down who were trying to take his life, and that weighed on him.

  But in the background of his thoughts he couldn’t shake the question: Who had fired at the Purists who were inside the building?

  It could have been the splinter group Conrad had implied existed. Nick wasn’t sure if he and Kestrel had been the intended targets, but based on the number of shots and the angles of trajectory through the windows and toward the pharmacist’s work area, Nick postulated that he and Kestrel were more than likely just in the way and that whoever the attackers were, they were primarily after Conrad and his people.

  Nick approached the first person he’d shot and found that, down to the black balaclava, he was clad in the same outfit that Sienna had been wearing earlier in the day at the warehouse. He checked the man’s left hand, found the tip of the pointer finger missing, tried facial recognition using one of the slates of the officers nearby, but came up empty.

  Maybe fingerprints or DNA would do the trick and help identify who this was. He went through the same process with the other body with the same results.

  Nick realized that his team might be here for the rest of the night, but if he could speak to the man they’d captured, maybe he could get some answers.

  After making arrangements for the secure transfer of the suspect to NCB headquarters, Nick dictated his initial report as he returned to his car where Kestrel was waiting for him.

  “How are you doing?” he asked after climbing in beside her.

  “Honestly, I’m a bit shaken.”

  “Yeah, I get that.” For a moment he thought about reaching out to take her hand to comfort her, but, opting for propriety, he held back.

  “I’ll be alright,” she said. “How’s your arm?”

  “All patched up. Let me drop you off at your car—unless you want me to just take you back to your place.”

  “My car is fine.” She told him the vehicle’s location, then said, “Who was that shooting at us?”

  “If Conrad was telling the truth, there’s a group of Purists that he and his people are not in control of.” He started the car and chose a side street so the CPD officers at the site of the pharmacy wouldn’t see them. “In that case, they might very well be the ones who bombed the production plant, and also, I’m guessing, didn’t want his people talking with us tonight.”

  “Where does that leave us? I mean, where does that leave you?”

  “We have the guy in custody—the one I knocked out. I’m hoping I can get some information from him.”

  “Conrad said there would be another attack tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Yeah.”

  Nick almost revealed that his team had previous intel about the second attack, but caught himself before he said anything.

  It only took a minute to get to her car, but it gave him a chance to think, and by the time they arrived, he’d made his decision. It was unorthodox, maybe even against protocol, but he needed someone he could trust while keeping it off the books.

  “I have to head to the federal building, but I don’t want you to be alone tonight. I’m going to send someone over to watch your apartment.”

  He expected her to argue with him about that, but she said nothing, and he realized that she must have acknowledged the gravity of the situation—being shot at will do that to you.

  “Thanks for looking out for me,” Kestrel said as he walked her to her car. “I really appreciate it.”


  A handshake didn’t seem like enough, so he leaned forward and gave her a hug. As he was about to let go, she held on to him a moment longer and he didn’t step back.

  After the hug was over, he told her, “Call me at home if anything comes up, for any reason, at any time.”

  “Who are you going to send?”

  “Send?”

  “The agent to watch over me.”

  “You met him yesterday at the graveyard. Agent Carlisle.”

  31

  As I exited my car back at my place, I thought about the hug. There was nothing too forward about it, nothing inappropriate. Yet, to me, his arms felt like such a safe place to go, and somewhere I didn’t want to leave. Maybe it was just the intense emotions of this week overtaking me, clouding my thinking.

  Or maybe it’s just that you finally found a guy who’ll treat you right.

  Oh, it was way too early for me to start thinking anything along those lines.

  But that didn’t stop me from doing so.

  Dressed in blue jeans and a charcoal turtleneck, Agent Carlisle was waiting for me outside my apartment door. He held a travel mug of steaming coffee and nodded to me as I approached.

  A dark, purplish bruise covered one of his eyes. I said nothing, but I imagined that it must have been some fight to have left him with that.

  “I can either stay with you,” he offered, “or set up shop outside the door.”

  I’d gotten a bad vibe from this man the first time we’d met and it hadn’t gone away.

  “How about outside?” I said.

  “Then let me come in and have a look around first, clear your apartment.”

  As we walked in, he scanned the living room. “Looks like you’ve had a chance to clean up.”

  “You knew about that?”

  “Nick—I mean, Agent Vernon—told me your place had been trashed.”

  He eyed Jordan, then nodded to him, and Jordan nodded back.

  “I’m going to check down the hall,” he said. “Stay here.”

  I realized that if Jordan hadn’t been here I wouldn’t have felt comfortable being in the apartment alone with Agent Carlisle. I wasn’t excited about him entering Naiobi’s nursery or my own bedroom, but I remained quiet and just watched him until he disappeared around the corner.

  Jordan said to me, “How did the meeting go?”

  “Meeting?”

  “At the address. From the water bottle label.”

  “Oh. It was eventful. I can’t really get into it all, but let’s just say I’m glad to be back home in one piece.”

  “In one piece?” he asked curiously, perhaps not familiar with the idiom.

  “Safe and sound.” And then, wondering if that was really any clearer, I said, “I’m just happy to be back.”

  “Okay.”

  I heard a door down the hallway open, then a few moments later close again. The routine repeated itself twice more as Agent Carlisle checked the washroom and the remaining bedroom.

  Since I’d given Jordan such a high Human Nature Alignment curiosity setting, I suspected that he wanted to hear the whole story of what’d happened tonight, but I wasn’t ready to fill him in, especially not with Agent Carlisle so close by.

  “Everything ready with the screen on the wall?” I asked Jordan.

  “All set to go.”

  At last, the agent returned, took a sip of his coffee, and then shared his contact info with me. “Alright, Ms. Hathaway. You call if you need anything. Otherwise, if I don’t hear from you before then, I’ll come back to check on you first thing in the morning.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I’ll be right outside.”

  “Okay.”

  He smirked at Jordan, then turned and left.

  I found it unnerving being around him and I was thankful when he was gone.

  Once I was alone with Jordan, I reflected on what was happening and where things were going. Trevor and I hadn’t come to any sort of mutual understanding regarding our relationship. He was the only family member I had left, and what I’d said to him earlier today had only seemed to make things worse. Now, he was already on his way back to Seattle and I had no idea when I might see him again.

  Someone had ransacked my place. This was the second night in a row that Nick had felt uncomfortable leaving me alone. And someone had tried to kill me tonight—even if I wasn’t the main target, even if it was only because I was in the way. Still, my situation was just getting worse by the day. I could only imagine where things might go tomorrow.

  Even though I didn’t want to, I had to admit that it probably wasn’t safe for me to remain in Cincinnati for the foreseeable future. I might easily have been killed at the pharmacy and now I felt like I had a target on my back.

  There really wasn’t anything more I could do to help Nick here, but maybe I could work on accomplishing something positive somewhere else.

  With your brother. Maybe you can sort things out with him.

  “I don’t know how safe it is for us to be here,” I said to Jordan.

  “At this apartment?”

  “No. In Cincinnati.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “People shot at me tonight, Jordan. Someone came in here yesterday and stole something I treasure. I’m thinking tomorrow we may need to take a trip.”

  “A trip?”

  “Yes. To Seattle.”

  * * *

  Nick sat down at the steel table across from the Purist they’d taken into custody.

  Over the years, he’d spent many hours in this interrogation room. He knew the routine. He knew what to say and what to avoid. He explained the man’s rights to him. Letter of the law. “Tell me your name.”

  The man was silent.

  “Look, we’re going to find out who you are and what your involvement in all this is. You actually have an advantage in being the first one we’ve brought in.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You get to make the deal. I can guarantee you that as soon as we catch someone else—and we will—there’ll be an agent in there, just like I’m in here, offering a deal to them. And I’m guessing you know that whoever talks first also leaves prison first.”

  “Prison is worse than death.”

  “Is that what you’ve been told? Is that what they teach you?”

  The man said nothing, but Nick noticed him chew slightly on his lower lip.

  From what Nick had seen, Purists would do nearly anything to avoid going to prison. They were all about freedom at any price. Over the years, four of the terrorists he’d caught had taken their own life either before being processed or right after their sentencing rather than end up in a cell for decades of their lives.

  Nick glanced up in the corner of the room at the video camera recording the interrogation, then faced the suspect again. “I’m Agent Vernon. What do you want me to call you?”

  “It wasn’t us.”

  “What wasn’t you?”

  “The Terabyne plant. It wasn’t us.”

  “Okay. Who was it?”

  “You have to understand, it’s not like in the military. There’s no chain of command.”

  “So, independent cells?”

  A nod. “Something like that. Point is, Conrad, the people who work with him, we’re not terrorists. We just want to be left alone.”

  “And how does that explain the assault rifles you and your associates were carrying?”

  “Look, all I know is something’s going down out west.”

  Nick leaned forward. “Where out west?”

  “Terabyne. Their world headquarters. It has to do with Stuxnet.”

  “Stuxnet? How do you know that?”

  The guy shook his head. “You don’t get it, do you? I’ve already said too much. If they think I was talking to you, if they even suspect I’ve told you anything, they’ll kill my wife.”

  “Who will? The other Purists?”

  Silence.

  “Where is she? We can
protect her. Tell me—”

  “There’s a mole.”

  “Where? What are you talking about?”

  “In the NCB.”

  “Give me a name.”

  The man shook his head, at first slowly, then more violently.

  “Tell me what you know!” Nick insisted.

  All at once, the man stopped shaking his head and bit down hard.

  With his augmented hearing, Nick caught the sound of the capsule cracking.

  He leapt to his feet and ran to the other side of the table. The man was already gagging, foaming at the mouth.

  Nick shouted to get a medical team into the room, but knew in his heart that it was already too late to save this man. Even as he held him in his hands, he could feel his body go limp.

  The Purists knew their poisons, and Nick couldn’t imagine that this man would have left his death up to chance.

  It was likely cyanide or one of its modern synthetic derivatives. And if he’d chosen any of those, either a tooth capsule or one that he’d swallowed and then regurgitated, there was no bringing him back.

  Five minutes later, Nick watched as the paramedics rolled the man’s body away on a gurney, a sheet pulled up over his head.

  He’d heard of Stuxnet but wasn’t very familiar with it. He knew it was a computer virus, but that was about all.

  Since his slate had been destroyed earlier at the pharmacy, Nick requisitioned a new one. Then, one of the agents on duty joined him in looking up info on the virus.

  “It looks like Stuxnet was developed during the Bush and Obama years by a joint effort between Israeli hackers and the NSA,” she said to him. “Although that was never officially acknowledged.”

  “Gotcha.” Nick scrolled across his replacement slate. “Okay, here we go. So, Stuxnet was designed to attack a zero-day vulnerability in the Siemens S7–300 logic controller that was being used in Iran’s nuclear weapons development facility in Natanz to run gas centrifuges. It would slow down or speed up the centrifuges under the radar, so to speak. It burned out more than a thousand centrifuges.”

  “How do you think this relates to Terabyne’s headquarters? They don’t use gas centrifuges.”